


Wake

by yuletide_archivist



Category: Whiskey in the Jar (Song)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2008-12-20
Updated: 2008-12-20
Packaged: 2018-01-25 05:34:53
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,097
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1634237
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/yuletide_archivist/pseuds/yuletide_archivist
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>An early morning after his escape, on the road to his brother's army station.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Wake

**Author's Note:**

> I tried to work in as much of my recipient's request as I could, and I apologize for the less adventuresome, more introspective tone the fic took on. I've unfortunately been acquainted with so many versions of this song that it was a bit hard to sort through the variations for a consistent storyline, so to speak. I hope I did it satisfactorily, though, and I hope my recipient enjoyed it!   
>  Thanks to Steff for being my beta and telling me that the requested slash wasn't as in absentia as I was afraid it would come across.
> 
> Written for Laylah

 

 

Even before I woke up, cold and dew-wet in the grass, I could hear the horses coming faster, faster, half in my dreams, half-convinced they were real. I dreamed of Captain Farrell, riding faster than I could hope to run, with his horse's hooves stirring clouds of greasy dust tumbling like waves, breaking along the ground. I dreamed him taller than he was, I think. More frightening. More like someone I should be afraid of.

I wasn't always afraid of him.

I don't think I am now. But I dreamed him anyway, with a horse that sounds like fifty, all with iron hooves. I can picture them sparking as they strike the road as if it were flint. I can picture him riding with my rapier in his belt, glinting like it never had in mine. Glinting me sun-blind in my dreams, while I slept in the grass. And I dreamed Jenny, my Jenny, my only Jenny, beside him, riding bare-breasted like a warrior queen, in high black boots polished like mirrors.

But I awoke to the early quiet that comes after sunrise but before the day. There was nothing but wet silence, with the slow shuffle somewhere on a far field of cows waking and heaving clumsily to stand.

The mornings always rolled in a damp-rag gray, with the fog smearing the fields like old pipe smoke, and the sunlight coming through feeble and dead. Mornings were always sickly; mornings never promised anything.

A morning never promised escape. A morning never promised the sight of smoke curling up from a friendly army camp, where there would be sausage frying up for breakfast. Where there would be a brother you could trust.

Mornings never promised trust.

That one morning that changed everything, so close behind I could reach back and touch it, was as gray and bleak as any other. I hadn't seen any gold promises catching the early light. I remember waking up with my Jenny beside me, her hair an autumn halo tangled in waves on the pillow. Her arm was bare and draped over the wool blankets. It was soap-white in the early-rising light and the freckles scattered over her shoulder were the color of slate. I'm sure I thought she was beautiful then, with her lips soft and smiling faintly in sleep. I'm sure I thought she was an angel.

What is true in the morning is not guaranteed by afternoon.

By afternoon, I had left Jenny standing at his side, looking at me with pity or scorn. Her mouth was a thin, tight line, drawn like a bow, and I couldn't stand for her to open it and shoot me to the heart. It hurt enough already.

By that afternoon, she was just a pair of waterlogged pistols and a memory like a bad taste.

By that afternoon, a lot of things were memory. The scratch of our wool blankets. The way our big window faced southwards and you could throw open the shutters and let any warm breezes wander inside in the summer. The three fat white chickens that gave enough eggs for bread and breakfast before spending the day clawing at the dirt by the well, looking for worms and beetles. The faraway half-laugh Jenny would give me when I told her a joke. The way she polished my rapier and gave it to me, her eyes shining, as I strapped it on and kissed her forehead. The way she smiled and drew herself up taller and I thought that meant she was proud of me. I thought that meant she loved me.

You can think a lot of things, but it takes running away with dreams of iron hooves at your back to make you really see things.

It makes you see that no matter how much you think you can trust her, no matter how many times you thought you saw yourself reflected like a hero in her eyes, she may be biding her time. She may have always had Captain Farrell's fingers tangled in her autumn hair, only you were too blind too see it.

It makes you see that you have no choice. You have to go back to the one person who isn't tangled with Captain Farrell.

I have to get to my brother.

It's been two years now, maybe more, since I watched him walk off down the road, sunlight breaking golden over the back of his new soldiering coat. The sun caught in his smooth wheat-colored hair and in his clear eyes, and he was so much a man then. I was so young then, I remember. He was the oldest son; I was left behind, finally forced to be the man I had always been content to let him be.

I couldn't do it. Sometimes I try to convince myself that it can't be my fault, that nobody could be my brother. I tell myself it's impossible to be that man without being a saint, always there, always steady as truth, with the sun catching his eyes like a secret that only he knew. Like a secret only we knew.

But the secrets stretched back now, faded like memories. Sometimes, late at night under the moon, with Jenny sleeping angelic beside me, I'd close my eyes and picture him. I would place each line of my brother's face, his neck, his shoulders, like a painter laying the strokes of the brush just so. I would picture him in the back fields, sitting on the fence, elbow resting on one knee, laughing at something I had said. I could always make him laugh.

Two years ago, and he may be changed now. The picture, perfected clear in my mind, might have changed now. I might not know what to do with it when I see him again.

The morning rolled in, the gray of damp rags and stale smoke, and I woke up now, wet with dew. Only the shadows of Captain Farrell and Jenny lay behind me now. I don't know if they'll ever catch me. I don't know that I will ever see them again. But I know where I'm going. I know who to turn to. Only the shadow of my brother lies ahead.

So now I'll follow the roads to an army camp that only might be at the end. His station lies ahead, cutting through the morning fog like a promise, and I can see it shining in my heart like the first rays of sun, pulling me closer with their warmth, drawing me in like his arms. 

 


End file.
